MWC: Wholesale Applications Community announces commercial launch

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) announced the commercial launch of the organisation on its first anniversary at Mobile World Congress today (14 February).

At a press conference today, WAC CEO Peters Suh will be joined by a number of CEOs from the organisation's 68 member companies as he unveils WAC-powered storefronts, demonstrates WAC-compliant handsets and web applications, and provides a view of future developments in WAC.

The WAC, which was launched in February 2010, is an open global alliance formed from leading organisations within the telecoms sector.

'In the one year since WAC was initially formed at Mobile World Congress 2010, we have achieved a great deal, delivering against our committed timelines and objectives every step of the way,’ said Suh.

He added: ‘Working together in a unified manner as an industry, we are having a positive impact on the mobile application development ecosystem, providing developers with a simplified method of creating applications and content, and delivering them across operator, handset and operating system.

‘With the commercial launch of operator storefronts, handsets and applications, all based on WAC, we can say that WAC is now officially open for business.’

Leading mobile operators from around the world, including China Mobile, MTS, Orange, Smart, Telefonica, Telenor, Verizon and Vodafone will announce at Mobile World Congress that they are connected to the WAC platform.

The initiative also boasts support from manufacturers Huawei, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and ZTE. Of the handset manufacturers, both Samsung and LG will be further driving uptake of WAC by ensuring that all devices produced by the two companies that are capable of supporting the WAC runtime will do so.

WAC has also announced that Ericsson has developed and is launching a white-label WAC-enabled storefront that can be easily customised to enable operators to quickly and cost-effectively launch their own WAC storefronts.

In a statement of future direction, WAC announced that it will enable applications from alternative applications development environments to make similar use of these network assets. This approach is consistent with WAC's goal to reduce fragmentation in the application market and will provide value to applications ecosystems across the mobile